Breaking barriers for people with voice disabilities: Combining virtual keyboards with speech synthesizers, and VoIP applications

Abstract

Text-to-speech technology has been broadly used to help people with voice disabilities to overcome their difficulties. With text-to-speech, a person types at a keyboard, the text is synthesized, and the sound comes out through the computer speakers. In recent years, Voice over IP (VoIP) applications have become very popular and have been used by people worldwide. These applications allow people to talk for free over the Internet and also to make traditional calls through the Public-Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) at a small fraction of the cost offered by traditional phone companies. We have created a system, called EasyVoice, which integrates speech synthesizers with VoIP applications. The result allows a person with motor impairments and voice disabilities to talk with another person located anywhere in the world. The benefits in this case are much stronger than the ones obtained by non-disabled people using VoIP applications. People with motor impairments sometimes can hardly use a regular or mobile phone. Thus, the advantage is not only the reduction in cost, but more important, the ability to talk at all.